Over six months ago I wrote a Donors Choose grant application for an iPod Touch for my classroom and about a month ago it was fulfilled. A few weeks ago it arrived. A week after that I purchased an iMainGo speaker case (which I will need to replace as we seem to have gotten a dud - I have had many iMainGos and it is an awesome solution, but this one has been terrible). One of the things our classroom staff marveled at was how quickly some of our students mastered turning up the volume while music was playing!
Our iPod Touch has quickly become one of the most valuable tools in out classroom. It is loaded with the following:
- hundreds of songs from my iTunes library
- dozens of Audible.com books from my library
- podcasts from They Might Be Giants, Storynory and more
- Proloquo2Go augmentative and alternative communication application
- Flicktunes app which allows music to be controlled by just grazing fingers across the screen
- Free Drum Pad
- Bloom
- Behavior Tracker Pro
- and more
- as a reward for positive behavior
- as a way to increase student exposure to music
- for students to listen to books and poems while stretching or resting
- as a way to distract students and thus increase prone stander tolerance
- as a way for our students to be just like the other kids
